


he was waiting (ran to the devil)

by endquestionmark



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 12:40:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3851323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a good person, Matthew Murdock takes to darkness like someone slipping into their proper skin for the first time.</p><p>That might be what itches at Wesley the most. It would be one thing if Matt were bad at it; if he hated it, failed them in thought or word or deed, then Wesley’s stomach wouldn’t curl so, and he might just be able to work with Matt without wanting, unremittingly and on an hourly basis, to break his nose just to see how it would sound. Instead, Matt is <i>perfect</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	he was waiting (ran to the devil)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=169429#cmt169429) as documented [here](http://endquestionmark.tumblr.com/post/117736733382/do-you-ever-go-to-write-the-scene-that-you-feel). Shoutout to all four people who sent me [this pie graph](https://31.media.tumblr.com/9d5d0fdb374fb2d1bc9aa0e4b4872e32/tumblr_inline_njl882Syg61sm4050.png) during the writing process. You weren't wrong.

For a good person, Matthew Murdock takes to darkness like someone slipping into their proper skin for the first time.

That might be what itches at Wesley the most. It would be one thing if Matt were bad at it; if he hated it, failed them in thought or word or deed, then Wesley’s stomach wouldn’t curl so, and he might just be able to work with Matt without wanting, unremittingly and on an hourly basis, to break his nose just to see how it would sound. Instead, Matt is _perfect_. He takes his assignments without objection and completes them not only within their specified parameters but well enough to avoid complications. Where the Russians had enforced a strict _not my problem_ policy when it came to loose ends, Matt ties everything up, tucks in the corners, and delivers it to Fisk before the sun comes back up.

Wesley doesn’t like asking Fisk for things. For one thing, he finds it unprofessional, though he knows Fisk would gladly acquiesce to any request to keep his organization running smoothly and his underlings reasonably happy, though Wesley likes to think that perhaps he’s proven his worth beyond that baseline at this point.

For another, he prefers to get things done himself. He’s seen Fisk in a crisis situation, and while he’s more than qualified to make the seismic decisions that direct his operations, when push comes to shove Wesley prefers that the responsibility falls squarely on his own shoulders. He’s not an ideas man — doesn’t love New York the way Fisk does, doesn’t have his sense of wide-angle vision — but he’s at his best in a crisis, in perpetual motion, and the perspective that Fisk is afforded by his altitude also means that he has no sense of what his operations need to keep running on a daily basis. Wesley — doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, per se, but — likes to make the minute adjustments, perform the minor diplomacy, do the legwork, so to speak. He’s the man on the ground to Fisk’s throne in the sky.

The reason that he keeps closest to his chest, though, is that he doesn’t like to use up his favor. Wesley is aware that Fisk sees him as not just a subordinate, but a friend; while he wouldn’t say that he’s fond of Fisk, precisely, he has certainly learned that there are reasons not to dislike him. Fondness is such a strong word. A shared vision and mutual core values, perhaps. When Wesley asks something of Fisk directly, it carries extra weight because it’s such a rare occurrence.

Murdock is on his knees, in a warehouse, left arm dislocated, broken ribs — close to a punctured lung, probably, given his penchant for treating his body as a tool to be used and then discarded — and some nasty lacerations, inflicted by the late Nobu, who is currently the main light source, doing them one last favor.

“We know who you are, Mr. Murdock,” Fisk is explaining, calm and eminently reasonable. If this takes more than ten minutes, he’s probably going to crush Murdock’s skull himself. Wesley hopes that Murdock is reasonable about this, though he does have a tendency to do unreasonable things. “We know who you are and where you live and where you work and who you love.”

Murdock is bubbling when he breathes, so maybe that punctured lung isn’t so theoretical after all, or maybe he’s bitten the inside of his mouth and doesn’t have the lung capacity to expel the blood in his mouth right now, but even so he manages to drag himself upright. He looks like a puppet which has just had its strings cut, struggling to coordinate himself and approximate some sort of human affect. “Just kill me,” he rasps, “and get it over with.”

“How predictable,” Fisk says. “No, Mr. Murdock, that would be a waste. Why throw away such a valuable resource? Instead — come with me. We both love this city, Mr. Murdock. We both want the best for it.”

“We don’t want the same thing at all,” Murdock says.

“And yet I feel we can find some acceptable middle ground,” Fisk says, clenching and unclenching his right hand. Wesley steps forward, lays a hand on his shoulder — _may I?_ — and, at Fisk’s curt nod, moves to stand between them.

“Mr. Murdock,” he says, “please consider this. You might consider your life forfeit, but what about, oh — Ms. Page? Mr. Nelson? Ms. Temple? And that lovely landlady of yours? And the priest who has only just learned how to work an espresso machine. The owner of the bodega where you get your morning coffee. The professor in your second year at Columbia Law who impressed upon you the importance of listening to the underrepresented. As hard as you try, Mr. Murdock, no man is an island. Look at you.” He gestures at Murdock, at the blood puddling where his right foot is barely touching the ground, the way his left arm is just hanging. “This is what you did to yourself over one old woman who you barely knew, Mr. Murdock,” and Murdock doesn’t react, but that’s all right. Wesley knows when he’s hit a nerve whether or not anyone lets him know. “There are so many more people you’d die to protect, Mr. Murdock, and the thing about dying? Once you do it, _you can’t protect them anymore_. When you’re gone, Mr. Murdock, that doesn’t solve the problem. That doesn’t absolve them. All that means is that they’re _ours_ , and you left them to us.”

Murdock is barely keeping himself upright now, good leg shaking, right foot twitching against the ground, blood droplets flicking everywhere.

“What you can do for them — the only thing, now — is work with us, Mr. Murdock. You can come with us or you can die here, and you’re the only person that’ll hurt, Mr. Murdock, because I promise you this: the people you love will be far too busy scrambling for their lives to notice.”

“Thank you, Wesley,” Fisk says, and Wesley nods, recognizing it for the cutoff that it is. Someone here has to be cool and calm and terrifyingly rational, and someone has to provide the comfortable alternative, the soft lies, and Wesley has never pretended to be anything less than a well-mannered wolf. “Mr. Murdock.”

Murdock gasps out a sob and crumples to the ground inelegantly, which is enough agreement for Fisk, who gestures for his security to take him by the arms and drag him out.

“He’s mine,” Wesley says, surprising himself.

“Wesley?” Fisk says.

“He’s my responsibility, sir,” Wesley says. “I want direct oversight, and I want in on anything involving him. I don’t trust him, sir.”

“He’s yours, then, Wesley,” Fisk says, and _that’s_ why Wesley never asks: so that, here and now, bitter bilious resentment already making its way up his throat, Fisk asks no questions, and gives no conditions, and, just like that, Matt Murdock is his.

Wesley sets Murdock up to fail, again and again: he sends him out without adequate resources or time to plan, with no backup; he barely gives him time to have his gut stitched back into place before he sends Murdock out to intimidate a rival operation, and when Murdock comes back with his midriff liberally wrapped in duct tape, clothes soaked through with blood down to his ankles, he lets their medics suture and scold him (the former sufficiently, the latter insufficiently) and then shoos the staff out.

“Mr. Murdock,” he says, professional as ever, pushes his glasses up his nose, and the door to the room clicks closed behind him. Murdock doesn’t say anything, and Wesley presses, says: “Matthew.”

He does react to that, though Wesley can see the way he suppresses it the instant the microexpression appears on his face. “Yes,” Matt says.

“Debriefing,” Wesley says, which they both know is a lie. The real debriefing will come when Fisk wakes up in a few hours, just as the sky goes properly blue and not the nauseating shade of navy that it is now. Matt will drag himself into a conference room, and probably manage not to bleed everywhere; Wesley will stand by the door, double-fisting black coffee, and wishing desperately for a smoke, and Fisk, smooth-faced and well-rested because he hasn’t been sleeping in yet another of a rotating cast of folding metal chairs, will ask general questions and get satisfactory answers that fail to acknowledge the monumental attention to detail that goes into every operation.

It’s not that Wesley feels unappreciated necessarily. He’s very aware of how necessary he is to this entire enterprise, not least because he can read Fisk without getting dragged over the event horizon of his rage and the childish simplicity of his emotions. If Wesley prioritized his ego over getting the job done, he would never have gotten this far, and would probably be gradually disintegrating in the Hudson River to add injury to insult. The worst fate that Wesley can imagine is mediocrity, and that’s something that will never happen to him.

What nags at him — keeps him up at night in his spartan box of an apartment, leaning out his kitchen window with his latest last-ever box of Marlboro Reds (nasty, they stick in his throat and remind him why this is his newest last-ever box) — is the way Matt is some kind of _prodigal_. He’s been a thorn in Wesley’s side for so long, and cost them so much in wasted effort and time and operatives, but the moment he turns his coat he has Fisk’s full attention and the praise that Wesley has earned. 

Wesley understands, in a very dry and intellectual sort of way that doesn’t resonate with him at all, what it must have cost Matt to work with them, to fight his moral gag reflex (Wesley assumes) and reassess his priorities, but he doesn’t like being taken for granted. He doesn’t like it when people assume that operations just _happen_ , because that means that the hours and hours that he puts in with paperwork and profiles and primary sources are completely useless. Wesley likes to think of himself as factually irreplaceable, and so far he’s been proven right. He holds the leashes and keeps control of, frankly, a pack of mongrel operatives. He lets them bicker and brawl and, when they’ve worn themselves out, pulls the skeleton of a workable program out of the debris and brings it to life.

What does Matt Murdock bring to their organization that they couldn’t get elsewhere? Wesley’s burned his fingers smoking down to the filter more than once beating his head against this particular wall. So he happens to be a more elegant variety of blunt object; so he happens to possess more discretion than your average run-of-the-mill attack dog. That’s no reason for him to be as indisposable as Fisk makes him out to be. He’s nothing more than an asset — a tool to be deployed as and when Wesley sees fit — and Wesley thinks that everyone forgets that too often, least of all Matt.

“Get on with it, then,” Matt says now, propped up on pillows and looking far too robust in Wesley’s opinion. He’s watched people bleed out, and he would probably be — well, he wouldn’t be less angry if Matt looked transparent the way they do, veins blue and red under his skin, but — a different type of angry, at least. He would be angry at Matt for being fallible instead of for performing up to the impossibly high standards he sets. He would, strangely, be angry at Matt for disappointing him.

It’s that realization that drives him to Matt’s bedside, forces him to say, curt and clipped, “No, Matthew.” He sits at Matt’s left, brushes Matt’s hair, soft and curling, out of his eyes, traces along the back of his ear. Matt doesn’t question him. Matt doesn’t ask Wesley what he’s doing. Wesley wishes he would, because then he wouldn’t be so good at what he does. He wouldn’t be Wesley’s perfect weapon, to aim and fire as he pleases.

Matt tilts his head, not leaning into Wesley’s touch or away from it, just an expression of inquiry, and Wesley traces down his jaw, puts two fingers under his chin and tilts his face up. “Hm,” Wesley says, raises an eyebrow, turns his face from side to side. Matt has a split lip, scabbed over, from a few nights ago; his cheekbone is the rosy red of an old bruise, and Wesley leans it to get a closer look at the delineations of the swelling, the hairline scratch where the bone rises closest to his skin. Matt doesn’t flinch, but Wesley watches the muscles in his neck tense slowly as he resists the urge to pull away, and realizes that Matt can feel his breath — the pressure of his exhalations — on the bruise.

“Sensitive, are we,” Wesley says, and traces Matt’s collarbone under the worn-out tee he’s wearing with his other hand, barely scraping along the skin with his nails to see the way Matt’s chest rises and falls, the way he holds himself in a deliberate fluttering equilibrium, neither arching into the touch nor flinching away from it.

“What are you doing,” Matt says on an exhale, putting barely any force into the words.

“Inspecting you,” Wesley says. “You’re a tool, Matthew. Something to be used. I need to make sure you’re not damaged beyond repair.” He drops Matt’s chin then and digs his thumb into the bruise, hard enough to push Matt back into the pillow, and Matt arches then, a reflexive twist to try and throw him off. It doesn’t work. Wesley has one hand around his throat and the other curled around his skull, fingers keeping him in place even as he presses until he can feel bone. The bruise immediately flushes an angrier red, but when Wesley leans a little father away, he realizes that it’s not just the bruise. There’s a pretty blush spreading across Matt’s cheeks.

“Stop,” Wesley says curtly, and stops touching him.

“Don’t,” Matt whispers, and Wesley tightens his hand until he can feel Matt’s pulse in the big arteries under his chin, the rings of cartilage in his trachea. He’s very aware that he has Matt’s life quite literally under the palm of his hand, and it’s an undeniable thrill, this very up-close and personal type of power.

“Excuse me?” he says, and tightens his grip further until he knows Matt must be feeling it, reads it in the way his mouth falls open, the way his hands tighten in the sheets.

“Don’t,” Matt manages, voice creaky. “Don’t stop—”

“Well done,” Wesley says. “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, Matthew. You have to ask me for what you want.”

“Please,” Matt says, and gasps. “Please hurt me.”

“Not good enough,” Wesley says, decisive, half-drunk on it. “Do better next time.” He’s risen and is halfway to the door when he realizes that Matt is reaching for him, hand open in the air between them.

“Anything,” Matt says. “I’ll do anything, just, please.”

“Barely adequate,” Wesley says, but he returns to Matt’s bedside, sits down again, and tugs at the collar of Matt’s shirt until it’s pulled down over his shoulder. He sets his nails into Matt’s skin properly, this time, makes claws of his fingers, and scratches welts parallel to the line of Matt’s collarbone. Matt arches, pushes into it, eyes closed and teeth set in his lower lip, and Wesley feels for the apex of his ribcage under his skin, the point where his muscles are thinnest, and drags his nails over it again and again until Matt’s skin is uniformly red and hot and he’s shaking under Wesley’s touch.

When he stops, Matt comes forward as if pulled by invisible strings and hooks set into his flesh, pressing into the air for a long moment, before sagging back into the pillows, gasping for breath and picking at the sheets, little abortive clawing motions to reflect the way Wesley is flexing his fingers.

“Be louder next time,” Wesley says, and goes out for a much-needed cigarette.

Next time, Fisk dismisses them both from a morning debriefing — some shipment rerouted, some low-level enforcement and intimidation — and Wesley leads Matt from the table full of representatives, of rubberneckers who want to see whether or not Fisk really has the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen on a choke chain. They take the elevator down a floor, into a level of offices which are still under development, and Wesley pulls Matt by the elbow into the corner of the room, knowing how badly it unsettles him and throws him off balance.

“Down,” he says, and Matt goes, knees sending up puffs of dust from the concrete, cane folded and placed neatly by his side.

“There are easier ways to assert your authority, you know,” Matt says, wryly. It shows in his crooked smile, the way he folds his hands behind his back, and Wesley just wants to counter that insouciance with force, to see that pretty mouth of his red and swollen and that steady grip desperate and grasping.

“Are there?” Wesley says, plucking Matt’s glasses from the bridge of his nose, folding them and placing them in Matt’s jacket pocket. “This seems fairly straightforward to me.”

Matt opens his mouth to answer, and he gets the first half-formed syllable out before Wesley turns, using the force of his pivot to put extra weight into his swing, so when he slaps Matt across the face with his open palm it rings out through the space. “I don’t want to hear your voice,” Wesley says. “I’ve heard far too much of it in the last hour. Anything you want to say, find some other way to express it.” Matt, slowly turning back from where the force of the blow snapped his head around, opens his mouth again, and Wesley slaps him on the other cheek this time. Matt’s face is already coloring up. Wesley can’t sense his body heat, the way Matt would be able to, but he can imagine the sting and burn of it. He smiles. Wesley’s hard in his trousers, anger and arousal and a particularly buried vein of envy, all things that can wait for the moment.

“Much better,” Wesley says. “I think we’ll do that again —” and he does, lets his fingers curl so that his nails catch. Matt vocalizes at that, little more than a forceful exhale, but still enough so that Wesley does it again, and then once on each side, and when Matt’s gasping with each blow, he stops.

“I like you like this,” he says. “On your knees. In your place.” He shakes the accumulated tension from his hand, fists it in Matt’s hair and pulls his head back to bare his neck — classic submission behavior — and taps his fingers on the side of Matt’s face, presses down on his pulse and gives him a smile that Matt can’t see.

“What do you want, Matthew?” Wesley says, and toys with the idea of giving him permission to speak, but decides against it. “Be creative. And remember, you have to ask.”

Matt, hands still held behind his back, leans into Wesley’s palm and licks his lips, and then turns to press his mouth to Wesley’s hand, lips slightly chapped. Wesley brushes his knuckles across Matt’s mouth, and the next time Matt kisses his hand, it is open-mouthed, licking between Wesley’s knuckles and breathing over the first joint of his fingers before Wesley runs the tip of his index finger over Matt’s lower lip. “Ask,” Wesley says again, “nicely,” and Matt sucks Wesley’s first and second fingers into his mouth, lets his teeth brush over the joints, flattens his tongue, and lets Wesley push through his gag reflex, fighting the reflexive tightening of his throat.

“That’ll do,” Wesley says, then, and lets Matt go to undo the zip of his trousers and palm himself with spit-slick fingers. “Go on,” Wesley prompts him, and Matt licks over the head, pulls against the grip Wesley still has on his hair to mouth at him, eyes half-closed, sloppy with his generous mouth. Wesley scrapes his fingernails across Matt’s scalp, and Matt gasps and lets Wesley’s cock slip out of his mouth, uncoordinated without his hands, the head sliding wet across his cheek. Matt tilts his head immediately up at Wesley, expecting punishment, perhaps, or anticipating it.

“I didn’t tell you to stop,” Wesley says, and wrenches his head around by the hair until the head of his dick is on Matt’s lips again, filthy-wet, and when Matt pulls back for a moment, his lips are so red and wet, and there’s a string of saliva stretching between his lips and Wesley’s cock. Wesley just holds Matt there for a moment, traces where his mouth is stretched with his thumb, and this time when Matt takes him in he goes slow, tilts his head to take Wesley’s cock as deep as he can, and his mouth is so _good_ , wet and hot, and the clutch of muscle where Matt’s trying to swallow.

“Ah,” Wesley manages, and Matt gasps for breath and then _pushes_ and Wesley digs his nails into Matt’s scalp, because Matt is shuddering and he can feel it, can feel the way his throat is working and see the tension in his shoulders as he just holds there, because that’s what he wants, what Wesley wants, and Wesley told him to be good, to take it, and he is.

When he finally pulls back, Matt’s chest heaves as he gasps for air, and he only takes a moment before he’s licking at Wesley’s cock again, his lips bruising and swelling, and his mouth is so wet and hot, the slide of his tongue so much and so good. Wesley has to take, has to slide a hand along Matt’s jaw to cup the base of his skull and fuck into his throat until Matt gasps — and winces, his throat must be raw — and Wesley comes down his throat, fucks it into his mouth until Matt’s licked him clean, lips so shiny and so beautifully _used_.

“Better,” Wesley says, when he catches his breath. “You’re learning.”

It’s very tempting to just leave Matt like that, come-slick mouth and wrecked hair and eyes barely fluttering open. Two weeks ago — before Matt came stumbling in with his guts literally taped up, punch-drunk and loose-limbed like he’d just come from the best fuck of his life and not a fight that he’d badly underestimated — Wesley would have done it without a second thought, left Matt to take care of himself or told him not to touch.

He’s coming to understand that, as assets go, Matt isn’t the best at taking care of himself, so it’s purely a professional decision when he tucks himself away and leans on the nearest I-beam column, arms crossed.

“Matthew,” he says. Matt’s barely there, as far as he can tell; Wesley can’t tell if Matt’s heard him or not. “Touch yourself.”

For a minute, he still isn’t sure whether Matt’s heard him or not, so he crosses the floor back to him, stands behind him, and takes him by the hair again. “Matthew,” he says again, and this time Matt tips his head back, seeking out the sound of Wesley’s voice, and when he does, Wesley wraps his hand around Matt’s throat again, fingertips pressing hard enough that he’ll leave ink-splotch fingerprints. “You can come,” Wesley says, and when he tightens his grip, twists Matt’s hair and pulls, Matt bucks into his grip and chokes back a cry and just goes rigid, hips rocking into the air, gasping in time.

“There,” Wesley says, and lets go of his hair, smooths a hand up and down his throat and drops his hand to his side. When he steps away, Matt slumps into himself, head hanging and shoulders curled. The sun is visible over the skyline now, candle-flame light streaming through the windows, and Matt looks wrung out.

“Adequate,” Wesley says, allowing him that much, and turns on his heel.

Wesley doesn’t make any assumptions about where this is going, or what it is, beyond taking care of business and ensuring a favorable outcome. Matt throws himself at unwinnable fight after unwinnable fight, beats the stakes again and again, and so it’s no surprise when eventually the odds stack up against him. One of Wesley’s many little birds lights up his phone with a notification, word that a routine two-night operation on Ninth Avenue — something Matt was taking point on, to do with the restaurant business (some start-up front for something significantly less legal) — has escalated to a hostage situation, and Wesley drags himself out of bed, pours yesterday’s coffee from the French Press, and drinks it black as he dresses.

Fisk has pulled out all the stops in Wesley’s absence, because his idea of deescalating a situation is to throw all the available resources at it in order to smooth things over before sunset, and Wesley shoulders through the guards who’ve secured the building where Matt is being held. “Sir,” one of them says. “Are we negotiating or going in hard?”

“Going in hard,” Wesley says, because there’s no reason to believe that Matt hasn’t been unmasked, and his identity is some of the hardest currency he and Fisk have in their reserves. “No survivors.”

From there it’s almost disappointingly simple. Wesley goes in as early as he can without taking point, and it’s like filling in the squares of a crossword, clearing the building a room at a time, in spatters of gunfire and muzzle flash and the soft thump of bodies. The lights go out a floor at a time, and doubt begins to gnaw at Wesley — was the tip wrong, have they needlessly antagonized a possible ally, _where is Matt_ — and then they’re going up the last double-flight of metal stairs, out onto the soot-stained roof surfacing, and there he is, under the ubiquitous wooden water tank, feet a few inches above the ground, twitching in the sudden silence.

Wesley breathes out, a long sigh of relief, and then breathes in and it’s as if his lungs are full of ice, of cold fury. He holds his hand out to the man at his left, doesn’t even bother to look at him. “Knife,” he says.

The handle settles firmly into his palm, a solid, grounding weight. “Leave,” Wesley says. “I’ll bring him down when we’re done.” Matt stirs at that, his head lifting, shadows elongating across his chest, the places where his shirt is torn glistening with blood, sticky and clotting.

“Sir,” the man starts, and Wesley rounds on him.

“ _Leave_ ,” he says, furious and proprietary. “He’s _mine_.”

“Sir,” the man says, again, and waves his team back to the door, disappearing into the stairwell in a clatter of boots and the clatter-click of jostling weapons and walkie-talkie chatter.

Wesley takes his time crossing the roof. He pauses to look down at the black vans clustered on the corner, brushes the brick dust from his hands, and considers angles of approach, the possibility that there are hostiles in the taller buildings adjacent, the plausibility of an ambush from the fire escapes. When he finally draws close to Matt, ten feet or so away, it becomes apparent that Matt is barely breathing, his ribcage fully expanded with no room to rise or fall, and that’s because Matt’s hanging by the wrists, tied to one of the cross-girders under the water tower, mask discarded just at the edge of the shadows mottling his form.

“Oh, Matthew,” Wesley says, absolutely frigid, and Matt gasps, creaky, body jerking against his bonds. “How disappointing.” He has absolutely no doubt that if Matt could speak, he would be begging; as it is, he does his best, rolls his head weakly on his neck towards the sound of Wesley’s voice, feet twitching again to no avail. “Did you _want_ me to find you like this?”

Matt manages, then, to vocalize a plosive, bubbles of blood popping on his lips, the beginning of the word _please_ , and his teeth are bloody when Wesley slips a finger unto his mouth, peels his lip back before running the same finger through the blood drying down the side of his face. There’s a nasty gash along his temple, and when Wesley sees that he spreads it with his thumbs, keeping the knife well clear of Matt’s face, pulls the cut open and stands clear of the way Matt’s legs reflexively jerk.

“No debris there,” Wesley says. “Tape it up, send you home, let you lick your wounds. How does that sound?”

Matt’s not even trying to form words anymore. Wesley wonders how long they’ve had him hanging, whether the muscles of his shoulders are numb or if they’ve started to tear, microscopic agony upon agony, as his ribcage expands beyond his ability to exhale. He runs a hand up Matt’s arm, along the curve of his shoulder, pressing into the muscle so he can feel the bones, the slight gap between them as he approaches Matt’s wrist, and against his will, Wesley sucks in a breath.

There are nails in Matt’s palms.

His fingers are limp, but when Wesley experimentally taps at the metal, they twitch, involuntary and immediately suppressed. “They were thorough, I’ll give them that,” he says, collecting himself. He can see metal glinting in Matt’s other hand, too, just past the rough ropes, and he returns to his previous position in front of Matt, inspecting the places where his shirt is torn and fraying, the way his flesh gleams a sick dirty pink in between. Wesley slides his thumb across the slickness of fascia where Matt’s shirt is torn at the side of his throat, where his neck meets his shoulder, and, dreamlike, he brings the knife up on the other side, picks at the thick material of his shirt until it gives way.

“Disappointing,” Wesley says again, and hums under his breath as he presses the tip of the knife into Matt’s skin and slips the metal into his flesh whisper-soft and sweet. It’s so beautifully easy to mark him, to leave an incision to match the one on the other side of his throat, and Wesley drags the blade down until he reaches bone, so gentle.

Matt’s barely moving when Wesley cuts him down and pulls him to lie in his lap and bleed all over his rumbled trousers. The nails are still in his palms and there’s fresh red blood flowing from his throat, not the steady pump of a nicked artery but the natural process of a wounded body. He’s so pliant, shivering involuntarily and not even reacting to Wesley’s probing fingers against his neck, in his wounds, though he does curl in on himself when Wesley pulls at his wrists and brings his hands into the light, palms up.

When Wesley pulls the nails out, slow and deliberate, Matt finds it in himself — dredges up the energy — to arch, feet skidding on the roof, and he’s breathing a little more freely now, though his voice is still raspy and nonverbal. There are tears running from his eyes, making the clotted blood at his temple sticky, and his chest is hitching in tiny, tiny sobs.

“Well done,” Wesley says, finally, when Matt is still again, curling into Wesley’s hands in his hair, stroking along his jawline and running a thumb under his eye, over the line of a bruise which faded long ago. “Good, Matthew, good,” and that starts Matt crying again, shoulders jerking, and Wesley gathers him into his lap to support his shoulders, gets an arm under his knees, and gets unsteadily to his feet.

He kisses Matt’s forehead awkwardly, benediction and betrayal, and watches Matt’s eyelids flutter in the sodium-vapor streetlight, corrosive orange, and Matt curls into Wesley’s grasp — his, body and soul — as he starts down the stairs, one step at a time, foot after foot, darkness closing around them as they go.


End file.
